Breaking Bad SEO - The Science of Crawl Space - with notes Why Breaking Bad? Story of a high school chemistry teacher who discovers he has cancer and starts producing crystal meth to earn some fast cash to help fund his treatment and leave some money for his family if he dies. Got me thinking about SEO as a science - requires knowledge, skill and regular testing to deliver the right results or improvements. Even the lead characters reflect certain aspects of the SEO industry… There is an episode called Crawl Space, which ties in nicely with this topic. This version contains the notes on the slides.

1. Breaking Bad SEO
The Science of Crawl Space

2. Meet Walter…
Meet Walter, the chemistry teacher.
Despite getting his hands pretty dirty throughout the series, Walt is fundamentally a good guy
and as the star of the show, from a search perspective he should be considered a white hat SEO.
As a scientist, Walt is methodical in his approach, he understands the principles and practices
needed to achieve results and has the skill to produce the very best crystal meth.

3. Jesse Pinkman
Jesse Pinkman, on the other hand, is a Black Hat SEO.
An ex-student of Walt’s who failed chemistry at school and became a drug dealer.
Jesse knows his industry and has the right contacts to get by, but he isn’t really interested in
delivering the very best results or long term plans.
So why "Crawl Space“?

4. The Totality of Possible URLs For a Website
“[You]…have several options to optimize the “crawl space”
(the totality of URLs on your site known to Googlebot) for unique
content pages, reduce crawling of duplicative pages, and
consolidate indexing signals.”
Google Webmaster Central Blog
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html
What is Crawl Space?
Google regularly refer to crawl space - it’s fundamentally about knowing your site architecture -
the first step towards successful website optimisation.
Identifying your crawl space is the first step towards knowing your site architecture.
Why should we care about crawl space?

5. Size Does Matter…
Google warn you about potential
crawl space issues in GWT and
outline some of the implications…
•Unnecessarily crawling a large
number of duplicate content URLs
•Discovering undesired parts of
your site
•Consuming more bandwidth
than necessary
•Potential inability to completely
index all of your site.

6. domain.com
domain.com/home
domain.com/home/
domain.com/Home
domain.com/?source=ppc
domain.com/index.html
How’d I Get so Many Pages?
So check what’s in the indexes already, is it a realistic number of pages for your site?
Do you recognise the URL structure/formats being returned?
The most common contributor to a large crawl space is duplicate content - seen here with
BooHoo.com, which can be caused by a number of valid and invalid reasons.

7. For SEO… There Can Only Be One!

8. But Don’t Lose Your Head
Auditing your Crawl Space will help you understand the full mix of URLs and help formulate a
consistent implementation.

9. What Makes Up Your Crawl Space?
To build a picture of your site architecture and to discover your complete crawl space, you need
to consider what contributes to your URL Universe – the place where all theoretically possible
URLs exist.

10. Poor management has
implications:
•Orphaned pages
•Incomplete sitemaps
•Dilution of backlinks and shares
•Performance is harder to track
•Limited volume of unique URLs
in analytics
•Crawl inefficiency for SEO
•Traffic growth strategies just won’t
work
The Threats
A lack of Crawl Space management can leave you wide open to threats, & lead to a load of GWT warnings!

11. Do social signals impact organic rankings?
•Twitter?
•Facebook?
•Google+
Potentially
Social and Backlink Synergy
Who cares!? Even if social signals are not used in a ranking algorithm, social media and SEO are both able to
drive discovery at scale. They both have enormous reach so understanding the crawl space for search &
social is crucial.
URL aggregation is not necessarily required, I’d recommend it.
So let take a look at how to tackle all this…

12. To get going we need all the components:
•A Cook
•A Lab
•The Formula
•Organic Ingredients
•Recipe
Let’s Cook!

13. Be the Boss (of URLs)
•An SEO needs to be a great cook…
• Make sure you have the right equipment
• Follow an accurate formula
• Use quality ingredients
•Take ownership of your crawl space
• Benchmark
• URL Roadmap
The Cook – YOU!
Just like Walt, you need to be the boss, the head chef, the daddy, ideally a scientist – but not a prerequisite
if you have the right tools to help you take ownership of your crawl space.

14. The Lab
This is Jesse’s RV – effectively a mobile meth lab. We need to set up our lab with the tools and equipment
necessary to develop search marketing recipes. Need to link a range of data sources to understand the crawl
space:
•Webmaster Tools - Google & Bing
•Landing page data (Analytics)
•Linked URL data - WMT/hrefs/Majestic/OSE
•Website crawler (Xenu/Screaming Frog/DeepCrawl)
DC’s new Universal Crawl now includes Google Analytics landing page data, along with link equity and social
tagging reports to assess a comprehensive crawl space in one.

15. Maximised + Minimised = Optimised
Maximise indexable space
•Increase volume of valuable pages
•Increase crawl efficiency
Minimise crawlable space
•Define your crawl space
•Identify and eliminate threats
Optimise canonical space
•A clean version of your website
•Your URL à la carte
The Formula
Discovery, management & optimisation of crawl space is essential and lays the foundation for strong
performance.
All spaces need to be carefully defined and managed efficiently.

16. Use Organic Ingredients
As SEOs, we have a whole host of juicy ingredients at our disposal to help cook up an optimised crawl space -
picking the very best ingredients for your recipe will make all the difference in testing your recipes.
Use the custom controls in DC to extract and schedule regular data comparisons for each source…
Overwrite robots.txt rules to assess full crawl space as well as the one delivered to search engines.
Schedule regular sitemap crawls and compare against internal and external links, review canonical setup and
index controls to maintain consistency.
- DeepCrawl Backlinks crawl
- OG tags & Hreflang DeepCrawl report

17. So What’s the Recipe?

18. Crawl Space
Solutions in One…
New Universal Crawl is now
out of Beta!
Review website, XML sitemaps &
organic landing page data in one
Universal Crawl with Deep Crawl.
Take advantage of a significant
head start in defining,
managing & optimising
your crawl
spaces.
Universal Crawl is the New Heisenberg…

19. Deep Crawl Goes Universal

20. Deep Crawl Goes Universal
DC’s Universal Crawl helps you quickly and easily understand
your crawl space and identify URL sources, gaps, new
formats and traffic value, plus you get all the regular DC
features including fully customisable crawl settings, ability to
compare test environment vs live site (support QA), custom
extraction tools and scheduled crawls that record change,
impact and help quantify SEO deliverables.
Lets take a look at some recipes to control your crawl space…
DeepCrawl automatically shows you what’s changed
between crawls so you can understand how much of the site
is changing.
You might spot some URLs formats which are changing very
frequently and affecting the crawl efficiency.

21. Understand what’s in your crawl space…
•Assess indexation reports
•Review the current index
•Test URL parameter changes
•Quick improvements through GWT Parameter settings
Identify Indexable & Non-indexable Parameters
DeepCrawl indexation reports help you quickly assess all crawlable URLs, unique pages, noindex pages and
identify URL parameters that you might not want indexed.
Use Webmaster tools data and and site: checks to understand current search engine indexation and use the
Parameter Removal controls in DeepCrawl to test the impact of stripping parameters. Monitor crawl
efficiency changes and for a quick win update your URL parameter settings in Webmaster tools when you
find the right formula.

22. Make sure you’re not self harming
•Check canonical implementation
•All canonical pages should be linked internally
•Assess pages without canonical tags
Canonical URL Configuration

23. Which URLs Are Being Shared?
?
Check the consistency of canonical URLs against social URLs – are your OG & TwitterCard URLs consistent?
DeepCrawl has a report called to automatically show any errors.
You can also schedule custom extraction crawls to regularly assess social share equity changes for specific
URLs using DC. Likewise for blog comments etc.

24. Where’s your thin
content hiding out?
Identify Low Value Navigational Pages

25. Take a good look at your analytics…
•Review URLs delivering minimal traffic
•Identify and assess URLs outside of your canonical setup
Identify Low Value Non Navigational URLs
Review and assess if you can make your crawl more efficient by excluding certain pages.
Check your non-canonical URLs & use Universal Crawl to see non-navigational pages not driving
traffic.

26. Identify Domain Aliases
Understanding who’s working with you or who’s against you is important too. Review your domain aliases.
Test all registered domains to check if they return a duplicate or redirect.
Check www/non-www configuration and HTTP/HTTPS.
Implement redirects or use cross domain canonical setups.

27. Monitor your domain portfolio & keep alert!
www.robotto.org
Monitor domains using Robotto.org

28. Check all disallowed URLs…
•Webmaster Tools
•Deep Crawl Indexation Reports
Disallowed URLs
DeepCrawl reports all ‘Disallowed URLs’ so you can easily see what's already being excluded.
Test changes to your robots.txt file using the Robots Overwrite functionality & develop an optimised
file that increases disallowed URLs & focuses the crawl on primary pages - test the impact.

29. Review & Validate all linked URLs…
Identify All Linked URLs
Check that your website internal linking is working towards an optimised crawl space.
Use DeepCrawl internal broken links, redirected links, 4xx and 5xx error reports to identify
internal links that are broken or are redirected URLs that may affecting your crawl efficiency.

30. Crawl your sitemap regularly…
•Run analysis and compare:
• Scheduled sitemap crawls
• Scheduled website crawls
• All validated, linked URLs
Compare Sitemaps
Identify pages ‘Only in Sitemaps’ and not linked internally, plus all pages linked internally, which
are not in the Sitemaps. Schedule regular sitemap & comparative website crawls to assess
what’s changed, you can monitor how much of the site is changing & map against performance.
You might spot some URL formats which are changing frequently and impacting crawl efficiency.

31. Where’s the link equity?
•Identify pages delivering traffic but not internally linked
•Understand the link profile of all pages:
• Crawl aggregated link data
•DeepCrawl automatically applies link metrics to all reports:
Compare Landing Page URLs to Linked URLs
By comparing sitemaps, GA and internal links, a Universal Crawl easily highlights URLs discovered ‘Only in
Organic Landing Pages’ and not linked internally.
You can add ‘Backlink Crawls’ to your DC projects, simply upload a comprehensive backlink profile URL list
and let DC crawl and validate the URLs. This crawl also helps identify pages generating traffic but not
necessarily linked internally, plus it automatically applies inbound link equity metrics to all DC reports at a
URL level – very useful.

32. Watch your
Language…
Check your
Hreflang!
International SEO Considerations
The correct use and implementation of HrefLang tags is important for effective International
SEO, but it can be confusing and even experienced SEO’s get it wrong.

33. • Universal Crawl tests implementation across:
• Sitemaps
• Headers
• On-page
• Review a matrix of language alternatives for each page
• Assess gaps and inconsistencies in the setup
• Review a ‘Pages Without Hreflang Tags’ report
• See David Sottimano’s MOZ post on HrefLang:
http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
International SEO Considerations
DeepCrawl helps manage a seamless HrefLang integration by detecting hreflang tags in
sitemaps, headers and on-page before showing a matrix of language alternatives for every page
so you can see the gaps and inconsistencies in the setup.

34. • Review your options and consider your URL Universe
• Setup your lab
• Google Analytics
• Google/BING Webmaster Tools
• Deep Crawl – Universal Crawl
• Follow the formula:
• Maximised + Minimised = Optimised
• Develop and test new recipes to focus your crawl spaces.
#BreakingBadSEO

35. Thanks, Keep in Touch…